Digital Politics in China: Mapping the Chinese Internet using Remote-Sensing

• In Event: Geography and Spatial Analysis

Abstract

The mass adoption of the digital technologies is increasingly raising the relevance of the Internet as a central infrastructure for political analysis worldwide. The emergence of China as one of the central global powers introduces the need to better understand the digital component of this country's politics. However, the information available about the Chinese Internet is scarce. In this paper we apply Internet remote-sensing, a novel technique recently featured in Science, to improve the capacity of scholars to study digital politics in China by better understanding the spatial distribution of the Internet infrastructure in the country. In a first step, we apply the technique to estimate the evolution of Internet connectivity in China over time at the country level, using official data provided by the International Telecommunions Union. Second, we test our statistics at the first administrative division (province-level) using the official data provided by the official regulator about Internet coverage together with Census data. Finally, we produce a geo-spatial dataset capable to describe a map of the distribution of the Internet in the country to empower the capacity of scholars to develop analysis of digital politics in China. We share our results using the Harvard University Dataverse, to enable scholars working on China politics to conduct their own research.

Authors

• Suso B Baleato, Harvard University

• Ji Ma, University of Texas, Austin